CHAPTER ELEVEN
What the Codex Sees
The announcement came on the eighty-second day.
Lucus was in the third row of the Class B lecture hall a stone-walled room with long horizontal windows that let the morning light fall in clean parallel bars across the student benches .
When Instructor Merel Ossian set down her theory text and made the announcement that changed the shape of the next six weeks.
Instructor Ossian taught Applied Combat Theory and was one of the few faculty members Lucus had assessed as genuinely competent rather than merely senior.
She was a former B-rank Runemaster who had retired from field work after losing hearing in her left ear during a dungeon survey, and she taught with the specific clarity of someone who had understood her subject through actual application.
She didn't dramatize. She told you what was true.
"The Cohort Assessment," she said, "will take place on the twenty-eighth of Solent. That is six weeks from today."
